The present invention relates to an image forming method and an image forming system to form an image on a textile by ink-jetting, and in particular, the invention relates to an image forming method and an image forming system to obtain high quality prints without producing transfer staining and color staining caused after printing.
In recent years, an ink-jet textile printing apparatus being superior in small lot and multi-product production has received widespread interest compared to various current types of textile printing apparatus such as flat screen and rotary screen types. In typical ink-jet printing methods, plural colors of ink stored in the apparatus is controlled by digital signals and small ink droplets are ejected onto the textile to directly form an image. Thus, there is no necessity for preparing printing pastes for respective screen plates and colors, thereby leading to a marked decrease in man-hours.
However, methods of ink-jet printing on textiles still exhibit various problems, such as; bleeding after printing, and clogging of the printer head by dried ink, causing transfer staining on portions of the textile, which are to remain blank.
The problem of bleeding after printing can be solved by raising viscosity of the ink. However, if the viscosity of the ink is raised simply, the stability of the jetting of the ink jet head may deteriorate. Consequently, known is a method which prevents ink bleeding by providing a water repellent finishing on the textile as a pretreatment with raising the viscosity only slightly. However, this method often results in ink transfer staining.
It is preferred that ink contains a high boiling solvent to prevent clogging of the head due to the potential of dried ink. However, when the high boiling solvent is used, ink drying is significantly retarded, resulting in unacceptable transfer staining and in color staining. The technology to obtain a sharp image without ink bleeding, by drying with heating to a moisture content of 3 to 30% after printing, is described in Japanese Patent Publication Open to Public Inspection (hereinafter, referred to as JP-A) No. 6-23977. However, this technology is not effective in cases where a high boiling solvent is employed in the ink, producing problems that transfer staining in non-printed portions of the textile still remains.
Accordingly, an aspect of the present invention is to provide an image forming method for textile utilizing ink-jet printing and an image forming system comprising an image forming apparatus and a drying apparatus to improve the dryness of the printed textiles. The further aspect of the present invention is to solve transfer staining and color staining due to specially formulated ink containing a high boiling solvent.
The foregoing problems can be solved by the following embodiments.
One embodiment of the invention is an image forming method comprising the steps of: forming an image by jetting ink comprising a high-boiling point solvent onto a textile; and removing the high-boiling point solvent from the image-formed textile by drying the textile under depressurized condition.
Another embodiment of the invention is an image forming method comprising the steps of: forming an image by jetting ink comprising a high-boiling point solvent onto a textile; preparing a textile roll by rolling up the image-formed textile with superimposing inserting medium on the textile; and removing the high-boiling point solvent from the image-formed textile by drying the textile roll under a depressurized condition.
Still another embodiment of the invention is an image forming system comprising an ink-jet recording apparatus and a drying apparatus. The ink-jet recording apparatus in the system comprises a recording head to jet an ink comprising a high-boiling point solvent onto a textile. The drying apparatus in the system comprises a chamber to housing therein the image-formed textile, a depressurizing device to depressurize the inside of the chamber, the depressurizing device being connected with the chamber and a trapping device to recovering the high boiling point solvent vaporized in the chamber, the trapping device being positioned between the chamber and the depressurizing device or at the exhausting side of the depressurizing device.